Azure Arc vs Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure comparison

Azure Arc is a comprehensive platform designed to extend Azure management and services to any infrastructure, allowing for a cohesive hybrid and multicloud strategy for IT management.

Azure Arc transforms traditional IT environments, enabling seamless integration across diverse infrastructure. By providing consistent operations and a unified management approach, it simplifies managing workloads across on-premises, edge, and cloud environments. Azure Arc equips IT teams to deploy services like Azure data services and Azure machine learning across hybrid landscapes, enhancing agility and operational efficiency.

• Consistent Management: Centralized management across all environments ensures streamlined operations.
• Security and Compliance: Unified security controls and compliance management enhance protection across infrastructure.
• Application-centric Management: Enables application lifecycle management for Kubernetes clusters.
• Seamless Integration: Compatible with existing tools and workflows, supporting diverse setups.

• Increased Flexibility: Enhances the ability to manage resources across cloud and on-premises seamlessly.
• Cost Efficiency: Reduces overhead by leveraging existing infrastructure for Azure services.
• Scalability: Supports scaling operations efficiently without extensive infrastructure modifications.

Industries like finance, healthcare, and retail utilize Azure Arc to enhance data management, streamline compliance processes, and integrate legacy systems with cloud-native approaches. Its versatile deployment capabilities ensure industries can maintain regulatory standards while modernizing operations.

Sangfor HCI is an IT infrastructure platform built on converged architecture. It integrates server virtualization, distributed storage, and networking. Sangfor HCI provides a unified management platform that converges compute, storage, networking, and security on a single software stack. This approach delivers a simplified architecture, ease of use, and reliability for business-critical applications.

Hyperconverged infrastructure is a unified system of data storage. HCI combines storage, computing, networking, and management, unlike traditional storage solutions. HCI systems enable you to build your private cloud, expand to a public cloud, or have your own true hybrid cloud. Sangfor HCI presents two product models: The Sangfor HCI server appliance is a hardware version that enables easy deployment. Sangfor HCI software is the digital version combined with a third-party server that enables flexible deployment.

Sangfor HCI supports Windows systems on desktop and is web-based. Its range of use cases cover a wide spectrum of industries, from healthcare to manufacturing. It is applicable for mid- and large-sized businesses. The software is customizable. Users can customize the logo and contact information in the user interface.

Benefits and Features

• Stability: Sangfor HCI delivers high reliability and availability with 0 RPO and 99.99% availability. The infrastructure is fully redundant to ensure business continuity. This means no data is lost in the event of hardware failure.
• Simplified infrastructure: The solution supports visual management, making it easier to use. The single platform provides a central control with access to resources.
• High performance: One unit of HCI can support up to 100,000 IOPS. The solution supports data striping, data locality, SSD caching and AI-based DB optimization. It also supports linear expansion without bottlenecks.
• Hyper-converged infrastructure that enables working with different scenarios. For instance, cloud transformation and data center consolidation. It is fully converged, which means it provides unified management, full resource visualization, and orchestration with SCP. The standardized HCI unit consolidates hardware appliances, a storage network, IP network, and server into a single unit.
• Integration: Sangfor HCI offers deep integration with NFV components. Users can deploy complex SDN networks.
• Pay-as-you-grow model: The pay-per-use model reduces operational expenses and total cost of ownership.

Use Cases

Sangfor HCI can be applied tin various scenarios:

• Enterprise applications: Users can benefit from the reliability and performance of Sangfor HCI for business-critical processes. The system is optimized for enterprise applications to enhance their performance and stability.
• Datacenter consolidation: The unified and software-defined technology simplifies the operational management and the architecture of data centers.
• Cloud transformation: You can add a cloud management platform, transforming Sangfor HCI into a complete cloud computing solution. You can then run your cloud workloads and benefit from the automation features of Sangfor HCI.
• Data protection and recovery: Sangfor HCI offers multiple data protection features, such as continuous data protection (CDP), which ensure the integrity of sensitive and user data. You can protect backup snapshots and take backups. It records virtual machine IO logs at frequent intervals. It offers disaster recovery capabilities that ensure business continuity.

Reviews from Real Users

Gabriele P., Senior Software and Systems Engineer at SAMU.IT, says "It is flexible like a hyper-convergence system. You can add nodes, and you can scale to have better performance and stability. I also like the backup feature, the recovery system, and the web interface GUI to handle everything."

A Junior Solutions Engineer at a tech services company adds that "Sangfor has many solutions, and you can easily manage their machine servers with just one management. They're always striving for greatness, and they continuously update their products. For example, they have now built endpoint security within the firewall. They are continuously improving not only the security but also all other products."